Rice Economics Spring 2017 Newsletter

RICE ECON Spring 2017 News and Views from the Economics Department at Rice WELCOME BACK! We hope you had a wonderful spring break – and have returned invigorated and ready to put the finishing touches on a great semester. A couple of items to keep in mind when you register for your Fall 2017 classes (registration begins April 12): • Our MTEC capstone course (ECON 496, Research in Economic Theory) will be offered in the Fall 2017 semester, in conjunction with ECON 470, Market Design. It will be taught by Professor Mallesh Pai, who joined the Rice faculty last year and is rapidly developing a well-deserved reputation as an outstanding instructor. • We have added labs to several of our core courses to help insure that students fully master the material introduced in these essential courses. The new labs will be offered in ECON 200 (Microeconomics), ECON 308 (Mathematical Economics), and ECON 310 (Econometrics). Students taking these core courses will receive four credit hours for each course. Calvi wins the UWIN Best Paper Award Professor Rossella Calvi recently won the 2016 UWIN Best Paper award for her paper “Why Are Older Women Missing in India? The Age Profile of Bargaining Power and Poverty.” Sponsored by UniCredit & Universities, Foundation, in cooperation with the UniCredit Women’s International Network (UWIN), the award highlights the work of young economists working in the field of gender economics. Professor Calvi received her award and presented her paper at a conference sponsored by UniCredit in Milan, Italy in June 2016. Professor Calvi, whose research focuses on issues related to gender inequality, poverty, health, and education in developing countries, joined the Economics Department last Fall after earning her Ph.D. at Boston College. To read more about the award see here . • Our course in Economic Modeling and Public Policy (ECON 479) will be taught by Dr. Jorge Barro who is a recently appointed research fellow at the new Center for Public Finance in the Baker Institute. Jorge is an expert on computable general equilibrium economic models and comes to Rice from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. We hope the rest of the spring semester goes well for all of you – and to all of our graduating seniors, we wish you the best of luck as you re-enter life beyond the hedges. Live long and prosper! George Zodrow Director of Undergraduate Studies Advising Corner Spring 2017 Advising Office Hours Monday 12:30–2 p.m. George Zodrow, BKH 260 Tuesday 12:45–2:15 p.m. Maria Bejan, BKH 251 Wednesday 3:30–5 p.m James Brown, BKH 250 Thursday 11 a.m.–12:30 p.m. Mahmoud El-Gamal, BKH 240 Rossella Calvi (third from right) pictured with representatives from UniCredit and fellow award winners, including co-winner of the Best Paper award, Felix Weinhardt (fourth from right). Friday 1–2:30 p.m. Peter Hartley, BKH 262 1